Speed up FireFox

As most of you already know, several years back Mozilla developed one of the first open source web browsers. But most people don't even know what that is. In the simplest terminology: open source means that the source is open for public use.

One of the most useful and barely touched features of FF is the ability to openly configure operational settings that most browsers hard code when compiled. I am going to briefly present you with some healthy reconfigurations that may speed up your browsing experience.

Addons:

Addons take additional time to load upon runtime.
Disable any and all extensions and plugins that you do not need ff to utilize.

Configurations:
These configuration changes are designed for broadband (high bandwidth) network connections and can have adverse affects if applied to low bandwidth tunnels.
Configuration changes specified are not static values and should be adjusted according to the specifications of your network. In no way should adjustments be made if you are unsure of the outcome.

Type "about:config" in the address bar

Click OK

For each setting just paste it into the search bar and results will populate.
For boolean settings a double click will toggle
For integer settings a double click will present a popup asking for integer input

network.dns.disableIPv6 = true
Note: Setting this to true prevents delays caused by improperly configured IPv6 servers, but does disable IPv6 alltogether

browser.display.show_image_placeholders = false
Note: Setting this to false disables showing of image placeholders while images are loading.

browser.tabs.animate = false
Note: Setting this to false disables tab animations

network.prefetch-next = true
Note: Setting this to true enables fetching the contents of linked pages in the background prior to clicking them

network.http.max-connections = 24
network.http.max-connections-per-server = 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy = 12
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 4
Note: Thse integers represent the number of maximum number of connections/persistent connections per proxy/server

network.http.pipelining = true
network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8
Note: Setting these allows multiple simultaneous requests to a server, but not all servers support this behavior

browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl = true
Note: Setting this to true enables caching of objects secured through SSL

Right Click anywhere and choose New > Integer
As preference name input "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" with 0 as the value
Note: This integer value indicates the time to wait before renduring page data

Right Click anywhere and choose New > Integer
As preference name input "content.notify.backoffcount" with 5 as the value
Note: This integer value indicates the number of initial reflows during timer-based renduring

Right Click anywhere and choose New > Integer
As preference name input "ui.submenuDelay" with 0 as the value
Note: This integer value indicates the time to wait before displaying menus

The following will move your cache from the hard disk to RAM and should only be utilized if you have gratuitous amounts of RAM and do NOT have a SSD (pointless move with a SSD).
browser.cache.memory.enable = true
Right Click anywhere and choose New > Integer
As preference name input "browser.cache.memory.capacity"
As integer value put an integer that will represent your cache pool in kilobytes (131072 as 128MB) or enter -1 to let FF determine based on your installed memory.


Be sure to check out FireFox Aurora for the newest innovations within an experimental environment.

 

Sweet, useful stuff there. I used to mess with some of this stuff but not since they changed the release or naming conventions on builds.

thanks,
Nigel

 

Oh that is really a helpful tip for Firefox users. Thanks for your nice share.

 

Or you can switch to chrome.

 

Not everyone likes Chrome (which is why FireFox is still one of the majority share browsers and equal competitor of Chrome).

 

I still prefer to use Firefox instead of Chrome.
This thread is really helpful to me since I always wanted to speed up my Firefox.

 

Thanks to all who appreciate

 

going to try!but it looks really realistic and useful. thanks for the share.

 

Some interesting information. Since I work from home, a way for me to keep organized is to use one browser while I am working (Firefox) and another one while I am simply online - it allows me to keep time manually, set different bookmarks and do a whole lot of things. Although these are all awesome recommendations, I would add something more which I admit is rather basic: once you have used a computer for a long time, you need to make sure you defrag it. Do this every as often as possible. Having Windows 7 means you won't have that problem anymore because it does it automatically.

 

My FF uses a lot of RAM (1G) since I open many tabs - Is there any way to optimize this?

 

Very useful information, these tweaks really do help some people, for me it seemed to be a big difference in the browser its noticeable.

 

I just opened FF with 40 different webpage tabs and only utilized 450MBs of RAM; perhaps you have an another underlying issue. I recommend you down load Piriform's CCleaner to clean up your caches.

 

Thanks i have win xp and i still use firefox this is good method thanks for sharing